Watch Dogs Release Date confirmed

Watch Dogs sees players roaming an open world, GTA-style, but with the ability to hack everything around them.

The highly anticipated next-gen sci-fi adventure, Watch Dogs, has finally been given an official release date, with Ubisoft confirming the title will be available from 27 May 2014.

Originally scheduled to arrive shortly after the launch of the PS4 and Xbox One, the Watch Dogs release date was put back, along with that of Ubisoft's other big new franchise the open-world driving game The Crew, only weeks before the consoles arrived.

Along with the likes of Titanfall, Battlefield 4 and Destiny, Watch Dogs was expected to be one of the early big hitters for the new consoles. However, only Battlefield 4 managed to arrive on time, with Titanfall due out on 11 March in the US and 13 March in the EU and Destiny and The Crew are still yet to receive a release date.

“We are pleased to be able to reveal to gamers all over the world the new release date for Watch Dogs,” said Geoffroy Sardin, EMEA Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Ubisoft. “We are extremely confident that the additional time we afforded the dev team to refine and polish the game will be more than worth the wait.”

Watch Dogs sees players take control of Aiden Pearce, a vigilante who is also a hacker extraordinaire that can use his skills to manipulate the world around him, controlling traffic lights, stealing money, and accessing secret information. The look and style is very much GTA with hacking, thanks to the 3rd person view and heavy use of cars in the game.

Although earmarked as one of the big new franchises for the next-gen consoles Watch Dogs will also be arriving for all existing platforms such as PC, PS3, Wii U and Xbox 360. Players on the PS3 and PS4 will get access to an exclusive 60 mins of extra gameplay, however.

Looked incredible ...But judging by the latest PS4 demo the graphics have had a major downgrade.

After the Alien Colonial Marines fiasco and what that did to Gearbox. You'd imagine they'll release something that when cranked up looks very similar to the E3 2012 demo[on PC] . Even if it brings hi-end PCs to a crawl.

Gearbox had to rush out a 5GB upgrade. And although gameplay trumps graphics. If Watch Dogs looks nothing like that demo, the backlash will be huge.

The thing is , that demo footage from E3 2012 ran on a 680GTX apparently . It was a playable 'vertical slice' according to the admin on Ubi's forum. If that ran on PC HW two years ago. There is no reason why two years on , with better GPUs and tools like Mantle*, they couldn't create something similar on PC now, on the highest possible in-game settings regardless of TFLOPS required. Ok, the consoles can't handle that, at the moment . But there is no excuse on PC, not two years on.

*Both Dice and Oxide said it took about two months to implement Mantle support for their respective games.